The Leonardo Blog

Although I’ve spent the majority of my career on the consulting side of the fence I’ve also spent ten years on the client side, in senior IT roles, where I purchased a lot of software.  It was in 2006 that software sales people started offering alternatives to the traditional model of licence plus annual maintenance for proprietary software. These sales people were offering SaaS solutions and subscription-based open source software, neither of which I seriously contemplated buying.  Given that SaaS and open source software are now an everyday part of the IT landscape - why was I entirely unwilling to consider them a dozen or so years ago? The answer is simple. In neither case did they offer the benefits they do today, and, worse, the people selling them struggled to articulate what the real benefits of their offerings actually were. For the purposes of this post I’ll leave the SaaS model aside to instead focus on open source software. 

  Integration efforts are frequently suppressed by the high cost of latent resources, slow delivery models, expensive licensing alongside the battle of retaining the capability of staff year on year. The maturity of open source combined with advancements in cloud technologies presents great opportunities to realise the potential of a scalable, subscription based integration to meet business challenges & drive business transformation. Below is a transcription from the presentation by Adam Mutton at the Red Hat Forum in Sydney, October 2017.  --   The maturity of open source, combined with advancements in cloud technologies has presented a great opportunity to realise the potential of a scalable subscription-based integration model that meets business challenges and drives business transformation. I'm here today to talk to you about the direction Leonardo was seeing integration heading in, and how we see it driving towards a replicable, repeatable, and robust model of integration, and what kinds of tools and services that are required to make that a reality. 

It's just getting too hard to support the business that wants more flexibility, cheaper service provision, faster implementation, connectivity worldwide and the supply of information to multiple user access devices. All must be delivered on a reduced budget.

As SaaS solutions become commonplace in several industries, the market has felt the effects. IDC research shows that SaaS technologies are projected to constitute a quarter of all new enterprise software purchases by 2016, while PWC estimates that SaaS delivery will make up approximately 14.2 percent of all software spending. Overall, the entire SaaS market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 21.3 percent over the next two years.” As a consultant working within a number of large and medium sized organisations over the past several years, I’m used to seeing common problems being solved over and over again, everywhere I go. Some big and some small, some more necessary than others and some with varying degrees of ‘fit for purpose’ tweaks. After all, every business is different and every implementation needs to fit the business context around what it supports. Shift toward ‘as-a-service’ However, there is a shift taking place and more and more businesses are starting to see the benefits of moving towards “as a service” type arrangements. The transformation isn’t necessarily a new one; the introduction of web based email and corporate social networks have become a staple of the modern organisation, as well as support and maintenance team products such as Sharepoint, Dropbox and Skype.  All of these functions within the business which have begun the transformation to Software as a Service offerings have one thing in common which confuses the bigger picture. They generally still fall into the IT or technology bucket of the organisation. They perform well serving their single purpose but very often they support a technical role within the business - after all they are still technical tools.